Note 1: Videogame Realism

Where most video games create fictional worlds, sports games aim to replicate real people and places. Realism is an important selling point, according to EA producer Todd Batty, who works on NBA Live. "We're constantly compared to reality, and the reality is on TV every single night," Batty says in his office at EA Canada's Burnaby headquarters. "It's on the highlights every single night. Any slip-up where our game differs from reality is where we're instantly going to hear criticisms." The company's producers provide a level of detail that borders on the absurd. In the "dynasty mode" of EA NHL 2004, users can oversee every aspect of their own pro-hockey franchise, from negotiating contracts with players to hiring medical staff to scheduling practices to buying new furniture for the GM's office.

In this model of sport mediation, the athlete's contribution is diminished to producing statistical information that will make the model more robust. As Azpiri notes, this statistical information as well as motion capture information of players performing actual hockey movements is "coordinated with an audio engine that features music, sound effects, and words by Canucks play-by-play broadcaster Jim Hughson and former NHLer Craig Simpson. The game stores more than 35,000 bits of their speech and stitches them together to form a running commentary that matches the action on the ice."

Thus, the Lineage of Radio Hewitt ends up running through the Television Cole and Neale to the recombinant nature of the Videogame Hughson and Simpson, suggesting a Third Golden Age of (fantasized and fragmentary) professional sport that is mediated by virtual space and artificial intelligence engines.

Note 2: Videogame Engines

Though the term "engine" in information science can be traced back to Babbage's Analytical Engine, its usage seems more in line with the automobile references we have become used to as we continue our journey onto the Information Highway. The engine features prominently in videogames:

Each EA NHL disc features more than a dozen "engines": specific sections of programming that drive a particular area of the game. NHL 2004 features a powerful graphics engine that renders every physical detail of a player–from his facial features and body type down to his skin tone and hair–as well as accurate 360-degree replicas of all 30 NHL arenas. The new consoles allow for a palette of more than a million colours and much greater resolution than previous games, Warfield says. The PlayStation 1 could process 360,000 "polygons" per second; the PS2 can process 20 million. On today's systems, a player's glove has more polygons than an entire player model had on the original PlayStation.

The first definition listed by the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language for "engine" is "a machine that converts energy into mechanical force or motion," with "such a machine distinguished from an electric, spring-driven, or hydraulic motor by its use of a fuel." It is interesting that the term "engine" is used in the context of videogames, since the fuel of such an engine is information, and that which the fuel is converted into is also information. The irony is that instead of mechanical force or motion being created, it is in essence destroyed, since the athlete's motion, once captured digitally, need not be repeated. "Rendered" athletes, indeed …

Comments

One response to Notes on the Virtualization of Hockey

In the beginning of this article I initially thought about the body image thats being sent out to viewers/players, particularly where it says, "most video games create fictional worlds, sports games aim to replicate real people and places". Granted the last video hockey game I played was with super nintendo, I have seen the new (and awesome) detail emphasized - especially in player profiles (ie. faces).. and the advancements that increases in technology has allowed in the newer games.. With this in mind, I wonder a) what this "real" message sends to viewers (as the majority of these players resemble an unattainable ideal for most men)
and b) the effect this could have on the players involved. Could knowing that your face and such will eventually (if you're good enough) be carbon copied/replicated/photoshoped onto an animated version of 'yourself' cause you to invest greater efforts into your appearance prior, during, and after a game? Will this interfere with mental preparation/focus/practice? Does this take away from the sport, when the attention is focussed on minute appearance detail versus tactics and strategies? Does it take away the ideology of a team, by focusing on the details of individuals? How does this advance sport? What happened to the days of road hockey games to ten, your favourite player vs mine? By allowing children to vicariously play the big scorer on the tv screen, how can children be expected to receive the benefits of physical activity? Shouldn't sport be promoting kids to be active in their society, instead of creating seasons in front of the tv - -especially because increased screentime is proven to have drastic effects on children as young as 5. Shouldn't investments be made to keep children interacting and moving, rather than stationary and glued to the tv?
— I suppose we can leave this to nintendo wii to solve.

Pooled in gigantic vats of cybernetic information, databasing is what we mean now by history. ... This wired future desperately requires for its survival artistic DNA.

Arthur Kroker

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.